Helllllllllp

[friskybivalves]

DD has come home with a Y6 maths paper and I can't do the last question 🙈

Can anyone help - such a ritzy way to be spending a Saturday night!

'There are 5 times as many pens in box A than box B.
Tom moves 76 pens from box A to box B.
Both boxes now have the same number of pens.
How many pens are in box A now?'

Bully for Tom. But is it algebra? Ratios?something to do with a bar chart? I'm totally stumped. As is DD. It's going to be something really obvious - I'm braced for scorn...

More solutions and methods! I love
Mumsnet for this. Thanks everyone. I'm going to use simpler amounts to illustrate and then move to pen and paper. And try to crack the bar chart method as I think it helps to visualize what's going on.

I have similar issue

I am a year 6 teacher and thought I'd say that I would expect MOST year 6 pupils to find that very challenging without a bit of help or some clues along the way. They are introduced to algebra, but this question is tough.

Sally Gardens and others are correct. The answer is 114. The bar model picture that Purple Daisies posted is very helpful, thank you. I
I would use a mixture of drawing bar models and explaining that the ratio of pens in the boxes is initially 5:1 (6 'parts' in total) but changes to 3:3. We could use algebra to work out that one of the '6 parts' is 38. Even then, they still need to understand that you end up with 38 x 3 (114) pens in each box.